Carroll is right that Stothart selected classical music themes which he found à propos, a method that links him to the tradition of silent film scoring rather than to Golden Age Hollywood original scoring.
In a few cases, like "The Picture of Dorian Gray", he even credits the classical piece he and his arrangers were using - something that rarely occurred.
Stothart was a gifted film composer. I've seen a number of his films, and while I recall his predilection for skillfully weaving folk music in his scores I only recall a few uses of classical themes. Yet even the classical composers at times could quote their own or other's works.
The mark of a successful film score is whether the music supports and advances the film dramatically. Stothart consistently accomplished that, and his scores are superior to much of the amorphous junk and bombast accompanying films today. To brand him a silent film score "compiler" is ridiculous.
According to Rozsa in his book "Double Life", the majority of the score for "The Picture Of Dorian Gray" was composed by Mario Castelnouvo-Tedesco (who was a good friend of Rozsa).
See the McCarty reference just a couple of posts up.
I don't know why anybody would treat Miklos Rozsa as an authority on Herbert Stothart. Rozsa arrived at MGM in 1948, after Stothart had pretty much retired. He died early the following year. It's possible the two men never even met. How well would Rozsa have known Stothart's music? Rozsa didn't go to the movies, and he sure wouldn't have heard much, if any, Stothart in the concert hall. Rozsa didn't even like to hang around the studio. He made it a contractual point that he didn't have to compose in the bungalow with the rest of the MGM crew. He was a bit of a loner. And, as William notes, Rozsa was a raconteur rather than documentarian. Half-remembered chats with MCT, cited four decades after the fact, do not undercut Cliff McCarty's archival research.
I think that one of Herbert Stothart’s scores worthy of release is that for MGM’s 1946 drama of A J Cronin’s “The Green Years”. In the clip below, you can hear the theme music and thirty seconds into the clip, he appropriately incorporates the famous Scottish melody ‘Ye Banks and Braes o’ Bonnie Doon’ into his main title theme, which thereafter gets more and more sad and soulful, reflecting the feelings of the recently orphaned ten years old Robert Shannon (Dean Stockwell), as he arrives by ship in Scotland after his long and lonely journey from Dublin and which is very dramatic and descriptive and, after all, being dramatic and descriptive is what film music for drama is all about.
